Cyber-physical systems are a collection of physical elements of a system being controlled (e.g., buildings, aircraft), as well as elements responsible for performing computations (e.g., optimization, estimation, communication). In other words, a cyber-physical system is a system that comprises a plurality of computational elements that collaborate to control one or more physical entities.
Typical examples of cyber-physical systems range from small scale embedded devices on a chip to large-scale systems such as multiple unmanned aerial systems supervised by remote operators. In some examples, human operators act as supervisors in the large-scale systems due to the high levels of responsibility required to ensure safe and effective operation of the cyber-physical systems. By way of example, one large-scale human supervised cyber-physical system is an air traffic control system, with each aircraft being the cyber-physical system and the air traffic controller being the human supervisor. The human supervisor is alternatively referred to as the operator in some human supervised cyber-physical systems.
Current human supervised large scale cyber-physical systems include fundamental technical issues related to the interactions between the human supervisors and the large quantities of data that are presented to the human supervisors. A further issue that can arise is deciding where to allocate the human supervisor's attention activities to focus the human supervisor on the most relevant events in a timely fashion.
In one exemplary cyber-physical system, a human supervisor supervises a building including a large scale sensor network. The cyber-physical system includes the building, building sensors (e.g., smoke detectors, security cameras), and building actuators (e.g., variable air valves, wireless locks). Further, a single human supervisor oversees the day to day operation of the building. With thousands of smoke detectors and hundreds of security cameras, human supervisors will be overwhelmed by the large amounts of data streaming back to the supervision center in real time, absent some form of metering or adapting the data provided to the supervisor.